Lifestyle
LA architect rebuilds after Woolsey Fire and reflects on living in the wildland-urban interface
In this episode of DNA Design and Architecture, host Frances Anderton speaks with architect Geoffrey Von Oien about his experience of rebuilding a home in Malibu after it was destroyed in the Woolsey ...
LA architect rebuilds after Woolsey Fire and reflects on living in the wildland-urban interface
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Speaker A
From kcrw, this is DNA design and Architecture. I'm Frances Anderton. Jana Ireland is on a mission.
Speaker B
I'm interested in telling stories about black people and black creativity.
Speaker A
Hear about Ireland's book of photographs of buildings by the architect Paul Revere Williams. That's after a visit to a house, a house that prompts reflection about living at the wildland urban interface.
Speaker C
I think we've lost some connections to the land that have been in place for a long time.
Speaker A
USC architecture professor Geoffrey Von oien threw his heart and soul into designing a home in western Malibu for his brother Andrew. The Horizon house is a remodel and an expansion of the 1960s era ranch house. And where the original house had been inward looking, Von oien's expansion opened it up to the sky and the sea. With angled glass walls that followed the ed of the hill and offered a staggering view. The house was completed in early summer of 2018. Later that year, on November 9th, calamity struck.
Speaker C
So when we finished the house in 2018, it burned down shortly after my brother moved into it in the Woolsey fire.
Speaker A
The Horizon house was one of 488 homes in Malibu burned down in the Woolsey fire. What followed was shock, rebirth, and new thinking about living in the fire zone. Here's Jeffrey Von oien's story.
Speaker C
We were actually here the day of the fire when it happened. And it came across down where we're standing here. You can see Decker Canyon. The fire came down and across all of the ridges along Santa Monica mountains. A big wave of fire came down through here and back up and we stayed as long as we could. There's no fire department and at the end we, we needed to leave.
Speaker A
Was there anything that you could do to try and put out the fire? Did you have a swimming pool with water in it that you could attach a hose to or do you know.
Speaker C
At that point we did have a swimming pool, but we didn't have any hose equipment and we didn't have any of the, the firefighting equipment at that time. And you know, having grown up in this area in the past, there have been fires where we've had a fire department truck at every house available to fight the fire. And we all assumed that it was only a matter of time for the fire department to be here. But by early in the morning, it crossed over the 101 and then just leapt across through the canyons and we were directly in the path of the fire, as were so many others. And the fire department was overwhelmed. They had all their forces on the other side of the mountain and just weren't prepared.
Speaker A
So devastating for your brother. It was his house. He had just finished, and he had just got insurance. Is that right?
Speaker C
That's right. He'd had his homeowner's insurance and had moved in. And it was just a devastating loss after, you know, what it takes to go through to permit and build house in Malibu like that. And this was his dream, really, to do something with me and that we could do something collaboratively as a really special experience between two brothers to get to do. And so it was a very personal loss for both of us. We both felt it very deeply.
Speaker A
And for you, this was a project with your brother, but you were the architect. You'd chosen the materials. You'd work day in, day out getting the building constructed. It was your baby, in a way. How did that piece of it feel? You know, architects are building. They're by definition, creating something. They're optimists. Fire destroys. How did that feel?
Speaker C
Well, it put a lot of things in context for me in ways they'd never been. You know, I think when you're in architecture school, you might have a model that gets destroyed, or you might lose some digital files or something like that, or in the professional world, you may have a project that you worked very hard on that ultimately didn't get built for whatever reason. This was very different. Pouring your heart and soul into something and then having it just absolutely obliterated. There were weeks after the fire where I would still dream about the project. I'd still think about things that I had done in the design, and I would, you know, think that they'd be there and that I'd show up and the house was there. And in that way, it did feel like a death or something in that sense, that you imagine the person is still there, and then you sort of have to pinch yourself and wake up and say, well, actually, that's not the reality anymore.
Speaker A
Gosh, Jeffrey, I'm so sorry. Did you ever, at any point, consider the wisdom of rebuilding on exactly the same site?
Speaker C
I think that it was one of those things that we'd realized this dream. And when you fulfill a dream like that and then it's taken away, but you could have that back. That's something that you want to have back. And I think that it wasn't something that any of us were willing to walk away from. And after mourning the loss, it was time to get right back to it.
Speaker A
So, Geoffrey, we ran into one of your subcontractors who's Putting a sprinkler system in the roof. Had you got one of those in the previous iteration?
Speaker C
No, we didn't, no. So this is, of course a huge consideration in the rebuild is how we can protect the house from fire. So certainly with interior fire sprinklers, but also exterior fire sprinklers for fire sprinklers on the roof that are designed to wet the whole area of the house and around the house, as well as fire sprinklers in the landscape that are designed to wet the area around the house for protection, which draw from the pool. And there is a pump that's operated by a generator which is going to be placed in a very protected, fire protected bunker like condition of concrete retaining walls in the earth. So that generator would continue to run without any chance that it's going to burn.
Speaker A
And to people that say we've kind of hit the limit of living and building in Malibu because these fires just keep on coming, what do you say?
Speaker C
Well, I have a lot of respect for Mike Davis and, you know, letting Malibu burn, not in a way of let Malibu burn and the houses that are there just burn. But I think we've lost some connections to the land that have been in place for a long time. The Native Americans are well known to have done cool burns they called, which were controlled burns around all of California. And in a way, these hillsides in Malibu and other places in the state have actually evolved to burn. They've been burned for thousands of years. And the burning was an important process of renewing the soil and in terms of seeds opening up and planting and renewal of the plants and animals that lived in those habitats. And the Native Americans here, the Chumash people, took it upon themselves to be real stewards of the land and recurring, tending to. And so I think we've lost touch with that.
Speaker A
So what do you think about the control burns? You've worked with the city of Malibu over and over again. Why don't they do them?
Speaker C
Well, I think there are a lot of issues with it. I think that number one, when people think about fires in Malibu, the thing that folks think about are these wildly out of control fires. They think of the fires that are sparked in Santa Ana conditions, offshore wind conditions, conditions where no one is really able to control or manage a fire. Whereas when you think of the controlled burns, especially in the terms the Native Americans thought of them, these were burns that were done at times when the weather permitted such burning. And it wasn't going to go out of control, it was going to just burn. The low level fast vegetation, all of the native tree species, the sycamore trees, the oaks and such, they weren't going to die or be obliterated by these, these low level burns of the, of the undergrowth and such. They were going to completely survive, not these super hot fire conditions like we're seeing now. So I think the idea of fire is a very different connotation for most people at the city. And I'd say for most residents it's terrifying and huge inferno that's out of control, as was the Woolsey fire.
Speaker A
This is not your only house that you are rebuilding in the Malibu area that got burned down by fire. You're working on, I think two others.
Speaker C
That's correct.
Speaker A
Is that correct? So you've. So those clients have gone through the same process?
Speaker C
Yes, they have, they have, they have. And you know, a lot of the folks who were affected in the Woolsey fire were very different than a lot of the folks you might think about who live in Malibu. They weren't celebrities or anything like that. We're talking about who lived here for decades, one of whom is a beloved school teacher and principal.
Speaker A
Your old middle school teacher.
Speaker C
Middle school teacher, yes. Pat Cairns, who is just the loveliest person you'll ever meet. And you know, these are folks that never asked for this. They certainly didn't sign up to rebuild their houses, but they feel a connection here.
Speaker A
Do you get from any of them a sense of fear of being in a house that's in the path of fire and that really they could die in a fire?
Speaker C
I think they do, but I think they also, within recent work that the city of Malibu has done, they've done a lot to implement an early warning system and to really work on communication this time around. Last time it was really difficult when the power cut out and the cell phone signal cut out. There was a lot of communication that was lost and a lot of mixed messages. And it was very frightening in that way, that sort of radio silence, if you will, in the face of disaster. And I think now they feel more confident about that level of communication with the city government. And I think they also feel much more knowledgeable that the houses are being rebuilt with these new fire protection systems and that there's a real awareness that this is something that we're going to be living with in the future.
Speaker A
That was Jeffrey Von oien, architect and professor at usc. Now, you may have heard him mention Mike Davis. Mike Davis was the author of the famed book City of Courts. He then wrote another searing critique of Los Angeles Power and poor planning. It was called Ecology of Fear Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. In that book, he made the ecological case for letting Malibu burn. I'm Frances Anderton. This is the DNA podcast. The architect Paul Revere Williams designed hundreds of buildings, churches and banks, hospitals and university halls, housing estates and grand mansions for stars of Tinseltown. He did all this at a time when Williams, a black man, was not welcome socially in some of the homes he designed. So admirers of Williams have long been fascinated by both his work and the indignities that he had to suffer in order to build so much remarkable architecture. And those admirers include Jana Ireland.
Speaker B
I was very interested in his performance for his clients and thinking about the way he dressed and the way he would sometimes keep his hands behind his back so that people wouldn't feel pressured to shake his hand.
Speaker A
Williams even taught himself to draw upside down so he could sit across from clients, sparing them from sitting next to him.
Speaker B
And just all of the little things that he had to do to make clients comfortable with him, to build his career. And thinking that that must have been really an enormous amount of emotional labor on top of the actual labor of designing these structures.
Speaker A
Jana Ireland was invited to photograph Williams work by Barbara Bester, who's executive director of the Julius Schulman Institute at Woodbury UN University, and now Angel City Press, has published a book of her photos. The book is called Regarding Paul R. Williams, A Photographer's View.
Speaker B
Writing is such a wonderful word because it means looking at and thinking about and speaking about it.
Speaker A
All the photographs are black and white with strong composition and strong contrast between dark and light.
Speaker B
I wanted the photographs to be in black and white because I wanted to both tie all the photographs together. So many of the buildings were created in different eras and in different styles that there's no thing that unifies them. So I wanted them to have uniformity and I wanted to remove distracting details, the color of a carpet or a bright and distracting wallpaper.
Speaker A
The book opens with an essay by Ireland. It's partly about Paul Williams architecture, but it's also about an experience that Williams and then later Ireland, also African American, both went through lack of support from a high school teacher.
Speaker B
Paul Williams had a high school teacher or counselor tell him that a black architect couldn't succeed and that he should try to do something else, try to be a doctor or lawyer. So the teacher recognized that he was smart and that he could be useful to the black community, but didn't think that he could succeed as an architect because Black people wouldn't have the money to pay him to design and white people wouldn't want to. And I had a teacher tell me that I shouldn't apply to New York University to study photography because it wasn't a place for people from humble beginnings.
Speaker A
Was that code what this teacher said to you? Was there a racial dimension to the point she was making, or.
Speaker B
That's something that I've always wondered and something that I wish I had pushed him on at the time, but I didn't know how to do that. I was 17.
Speaker A
But you certainly didn't let it stop you because you wound up taking that as an incentive to actually prove him wrong. Correct?
Speaker B
I did, but only after a period of taking it very seriously and almost not applying.
Speaker A
And this project, you welcomed this project in part because it fits into a kind of a larger interest that you have. Can you explain that?
Speaker B
I'm interested in telling stories about black people and black creativity. And I have also always had a bit of an interest in architecture that I never knew how to express.
Speaker A
When you say black creativity, do you mean black in America creativity and the particular issues attached to that, or are we talking more about kind of a blacker?
Speaker B
I would say black creativity in America. That's my experience. That's what I'm thinking about, the experience of being black here and being a creative person here.
Speaker A
Do you think there are ways in which creativity is constrained? Black creativity, I should say.
Speaker B
I don't think that creativity in general is constrained. I think there are constraints on the degree to which that creativity is appreciated and the ways in which it's appreciated. And I think that there are constraints on the technology that people have access to, the resources that people have access to to learn about different ways to express their personal creativity.
Speaker A
So you chose as your mode of creativity, photography. So let's get onto the pictures then, because you really have a very, very distinct style. I'm just looking, for starters at the front cover. And what I'm seeing on the front cover is a staircase. But I'm also seeing beyond the staircase to a level above, through the railings to pictures above. It's a foreground and a background. It's in a very elegant space. And the way you've captured it is a wonderful kind of essay. In Darkness and Light. Yes.
Speaker B
One of the things that Paul Williams is very well known for is these grand, sweeping staircases. So I wanted to photograph this staircase, this magnificent staircase, as many ways as I could. And I did get some views that got the entire thing. But I also Wanted to get in close and really focus on some of the curves and the real beauty of them. Not just the thing as a whole, but individual little parts of it. And one thing that really draws me to this photograph and made it a contender for the COVID is those levels, the stairs in the front and then the view of upstairs that you can see in the back. And so much of the work that I did was kind of shooting around people's possessions. These are homes that people really do live in.
Speaker A
Which house was this?
Speaker B
It's a home that he designed for an appliance manufacturer in Hancock Park. And it's one of those homes that has moved through several sets of hands. Some are pretty well preserved, but some have gone through all kinds of changes. And this was a house where some previous owners had not taken good care of it, and the current owners had to really work to restore it to its original glory.
Speaker A
But you mentioned the staircase and the grandness, the elegance of the staircase, and you mentioned the curves. Are these all qualities that you think appear in a lot of his projects?
Speaker B
Yes, there are curves all over his projects. Staircases, doorways, ceilings. He gets them in all over the place.
Speaker A
There's something cinematic, though, because those stairways in some of the more affluent houses that he designed are really quite something. I mean, you have to be wearing a sweeping, you know, evening gown to even have the right to climb those staircases.
Speaker B
Yes, there is. There's real, real Hollywood glamour in them. And that's a style that he helped define. It's not something that he was copying. It's something that he was part of creating.
Speaker A
Oh, tell us about that.
Speaker B
Well, in early Hollywood, people were building these homes and they were interested in these sort of grand revivalist, European inspired styles. And so Paul Williams was one of the architects who was working at this time when there was suddenly all this money in Los Angeles and people who needed these homes built. So he would design a house for someone, and then someone who purchased land down the street would say, oh, that house is grand. That's what I want. I want that architect to do something like that for me.
Speaker A
Amazing. So if we scroll down now, I'm looking at a layout of a spread with four houses. Less grand, much simpler. What are these houses?
Speaker B
Those are homes from a neighborhood called Berkeley Square in Las Vegas. And those were built for black families in the late 1940s. So they were. That's something that he did here, too. There were black GIs who had. Who were able to secure mortgages through the VA and build their own homes. For the first time.
Speaker A
This was a whole tract of homes that he designed here?
Speaker B
Yes, about 150 homes. So you could purchase a plot of land and then choose from one of the plans that he created for the design of your house.
Speaker A
To the extent your journey takes you into the mind of Paul Williams, what do you think he felt when he worked on this project?
Speaker B
I think that he was probably excited for the challenge. He wanted to serve the black community and I also think he wanted to just do as many different kinds of projects as he could. So this was an opportunity to do both things.
Speaker A
Why do you think it took a while for Paul Williams to be recognized for his, you know, vast talent and an output?
Speaker B
I think among architects there is a degree to which people really want distinctive style. And that Paul Williams didn't get as much credit as he should have, not only because he was black, but because he was working in so many different styles that people might have thought, oh, he's a generalist, he's not as skilled as we are, when in fact it took incredible skill to be able to do all of these things so well.
Speaker A
And he also didn't write manifestos and come up with utopian theories of architecture. He did the work.
Speaker B
He did the work absolutely. And did the best job he could every time.
Speaker A
Well, Janet Ireland, it's really a lovely book. You said that you are still photographing Paul Williams houses and sorry buildings and I assume will continue to do so. But are you working on other photographic projects and what are they?
Speaker B
I've been photographing my life here at home since quarantine began. My family and I are still self isolating pretty seriously. So I make lots of photographs of my children here at home in a way that I wasn't really comfortable photographing them before. I'd made sort of staged family portraits and there's one early on in the book I wanted to kind of sneak my children in there, you know, so the people that they would know in the future how important they were to me. I wanted them to see themselves in the book.
Speaker A
Are you hoping that they will understand how important this man was and is?
Speaker B
I do hope that they understand. It's not something that we talk about now, but I want them to grow up always knowing that there was this figure who beat these incredible odds and did this incredible work. I want them to see that possibility in themselves.
Speaker A
Well, Jana Ireland, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Speaker B
Thank you, Frances.
Speaker A
You've been listening to Jana Ireland talking about her book regarding Paul R. Williams A Photographer's View. Her book has been shortlisted for Paris photo and Aperture's 2020 Photo Book Awards. Paul Revere Williams was the first black member of the American Institute of Architects. He joined in 1920. He received the AIA's posthumous gold medal in 2017. I'm Frances Anderton. Thank you for listening to DNA.
Topics Covered
black creativity
Paul Revere Williams
Horizon house
Malibu fire
Woolsey fire
architecture and design
fire protection systems
controlled burns
USC architecture professor
Jana Ireland photography
African American architects
emotional labor in architecture
black and white photography
storytelling in architecture
community resilience